WONDERLAND × THE KOOPLES – PALACE

Palace are a London guitar band dragging guitar music out of the middle of the road and into the shameful mischievous gutter.

Palace go way back. They’re four ruddy-cheeked, Mum-friendly lads who went to school together in Dorset. “We’ve known each other since we were pretty young,” explains lead singer Leo Wyndham. “We were all in different bands in school.” It wasn’t until two and half years ago that Wyndham and his mates Matt Hodges and Will Dorey decided to combine their disparate skills and sounds. Considering their past forays into everything from psych-rock to Rage Against the Machine covers, they could not have predicted what might emerge. The result was a meandering, Jeff Buckley-influenced blues-rock sound and an in-at-the-deep-end set at their mate’s open mic night in Camden. “We were so under-rehearsed,” recalls Wyndham. “We had no idea if people would like it. But they just did.”

Two years on, the three are now four (with Rupert Turner taking on guitar duties) and they have a debut EP under their belts. Veins, released in early 2014, displayed a confident quietness teamed with an arena-ready appeal that has industry tongues wagging. They played a handful of festival dates last summer and are chomping at the bit to get back into a field this year. “Festivals are the funnest thing ever,” beams Wyndham. “You have that challenge of trying to lure people into the tent by getting just one chord into their ears”. And what do they hope people will get out of their performances? “A girl cried at our Secret Garden Party show last year,” beams Dorey. “But it was on the Sunday – I think she might just have been on a massive comedown.”

It is this bumbling humility teamed with radio-ready songs and a photogenic frontman that will likely see Palaces dubbed the Next Big Thing. But, in essence, they are still just four mates from school who get a kick out of making music together. “We’re quite keen not to project too much,” explains Wyndham. “As soon as you start thinking about things that you want, it stops being fun. This all happened quite organically, and we’d like to keep it
that way.”